Mulled wine is not a wine for solitary meditation. The producers and bottlers of flavored wine-based drinks, which in addition to mulled wine, also include punch, berry wine, punch, sangria and cocktails, are also aware of this. Non-alcoholic foods can also be seasoned and heated so that children and pregnant women can preheat or those who generally refrain from alcohol. But many Christmas markets, before Corona a glowing international market, were dismantled as soon as they were set up. And now? You can dress up a chocolate Santa Claus later as an upright Easter bunny, but mulled wine?
A tour of all the grocery stores in my area amazes me. The mulled wine shelves in the joint municipality of Ostheide in the Lüneburg district have largely been looted. There is nothing left in the first Aldi store.
“Dear Mr. Reinhardt,” the editors asked me on the 2nd of Advent, “please try a few mulled wines for us. But don't be too strict about this. ”As a corrective measure, I was supposed to turn the forester family next door into mulled wine experts, which I wanted to do. Only to find out that Frau Försterin actually prefers to drink whiskey and that even a moose or deer on the label could never induce her husband to drink mulled wine. When the photographer came to see me in the forest, one of his first questions was whether I would have no hesitation in ruining my reputation as a serious critic of fine wines with a mulled wine test. "Yes," I replied. But the fear of how I would fare after trying 26 “winter magic” is even greater.
When I wanted to go to the rehearsal in the evening, I dared another advertising attempt next door.
Frau Försterin was just baking Christmas cookies, and the hunter shouted: “Come on, let's try mulled wine.” At the end I carried the 26 bottles over to the forester's house, where I heated everything to 60 ° C one after the other.
After four hours - instead of bratwurst there was wild boar ham - we had a toothache because of the acids and sugar, but we were all done.
Here are the 14 favorites and a warning from the knightly forest yard.
“Pure Wine” special: Stephan Reinhardt regularly writes the “Pure Wine” column in the FAS; otherwise he is a critic for the renowned information service "Robert Parker Wine Advocate".